When A. M. Rosenthal, the managing
editor of the Times, was asked about the discrepancies
in his paper, he explained that the December 7th report,
which stated, "Twenty-eight Black Panthers have been killed
in run-ins with the police since January 1, 1968," was taken
from a December 5th story by the same reporter, which said,
"According to Charles Garry ... [Hampton and Clark] were
the 27th and 28th Black Panthers killed in clashes with
the police since January of 1968," and which was itself
based on a telephone conversation with Garry. In the December
7th story, the qualifying phrase "according to Charles Garry"
had been deleted, Rosenthal said, because "the reporter
probably felt the source was unimportant in the second story"
although Rosenthal, in discussing the matter, said that
he personally felt that the reporter should not have turned
an assertion by an interested party into a fact. The figure
of twenty-eight had subsequently been reported as fact because
the reporter "inadvertently referred to the first figure,"
and this had happened because "no flag was placed on the
error." (Whitney Young's assertion that "nearly thirty Panthers
have been murdered by law-enforcement officials" was based
on the Times, according to his research assistant,
and the Times was then able to report in a Sunday
summary that the charge of a "national conspiracy" against
the Panthers "has been echoed by more moderate civil rights
leaders.")

Ben Bagdikian, the national editor of
the Washington Post, also named Garry as the source
for his newspaper's assertion that twenty-eight Panthers
had been killed by police-- though the only “specific documentation"
on the subject was the UPI bulletin of December 12th. The
bulletin, which went out to more than four thousand subscribing
domestic newspapers and broadcasting stations, came from
the news agency's San Francisco bureau, which, according
to its manager, H. Jefferson Grigsby, obtained the list
of "victims of cold-blooded murder by the police" from Panther
sources. "There was no further dispatch modifying the December
12th story," Grigsby has noted. Garry's list apparently
provided publications such as the New Republic, Ramparts
and the New Statesman with the "fact" that
twenty Panthers had been killed by police, and Ramparts,in
turn, furnished an organization called the Committee to
Defend the Panthers with what the committee called the "grim
statistic" of twenty Panthers dead.

And so it went. Although Garry was certainly
an interested party in the controversy over what came to
be called the war between the Panthers and the police, it
is clear that his assertions were widely accepted at their
face value, so even when modifications were made in the
lists of casualties it was Garry’s story that was being
modified, and practically no independent checking was done.

How, then, did Garry arrive at his figures?
In September, 1970, Garry explained to me that he chose
the number twenty-eight when newsmen called him for a statement
after the shooting of Hampton and Clark because that "seemed
to be a safe number." He added that he believed the “actual
number of Panthers murdered by the police is many times”
that figure." When pressed for the names, however, Garry
found he could "document" only “twenty police murders" of
Panthers.

The list of "twenty murders," which
was sent to me from Garry's office, along with a warning
that "facts are not necessarily empirical," actually
comprised only nineteen Panther deaths, and one of the deaths
— that of Sidney Mille in Seattle, is attributed by Garry
not to police but to "a merchant who claimed he thought
Miller was going to rob the store." In the coroner's records,
the statement of the Seattle police is that “the deceased
and an unknown person were robbing the Seven-Eleven store
at 8856 35th Ave. S.W., and in the progress of the robbery
the deceased was shot with a .38-caliber snub-nosed Smith
& Wesson by the store owner, Donald F. Lannoye." Lannoye
does not dispute the statement that he fired the fatal shot.

That leaves eighteen "documented" cases
involving Black Panthers who Garry claims were murdered
by police in pursuance of a policy to "commit genocide
upon" the Black Panthers. Garry's list of eighteen
Panthers allegedly murdered by the police is as follows:

THE CASE OF ALEX RACKLEY

On May 21, 1969, John Mroczka, a twenty-three-year-old
factory worker, stopped his motorcycle near a bridge on
Route 147 outside of Middlefield, Connecticut, and while
walking along the edge of a stream looking for trout saw
a "set of legs" and "body" partly submerged. State police
were called to the scene by Mroczka, and they recovered
from the Stream the body of a black male whose wrists were
tied with gauze and whose neck was encircled by a noose
fashioned from a wire coat hanger. An autopsy, conducted
immediately afterward, indicated that the man had been severely
burned on wide areas of the chest, wrists, buttocks, thighs,
and right shoulder and had also been beaten around the face,
the groin, and the lumbar region with a hard object before
he was shot in the head and chest. The victim, who was subsequently
identified by his fingerprints as Alex Rackley, had died,
a pathologist concluded, within the preceding twelve to
twenty four hours.

Just after midnight on May 22nd, New
Haven police acted on a tip supplied by an informant who
identified a Polaroid photograph of the corpse as a man
who had been tortured with scalding water in an apartment
that served as the headquarter of the Black Panther Party.
Around 12:30 A.M., they raided the apartment and arrested
Warren Kimbro, thirty-five, one of the leaders of the New
Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party, and five women
members. Eventually, eight other Black Panthers, including
Bobby Seale, the national chairman of the Party, were arrested,
and all of those arrested, except two who were remanded
to a juvenile court, were charged with complicity, in varying
degrees, in the kidnaping or torture or murder of Alex Rackley,
a twenty-four year old teenage member of the New York chapter
of the Black Panther party.

Charles Garry immediately charged that
"Rackley was killed by the police or by agents of some armed
agency of the government." Holding that the murder victim
was in "good standing" in the Party, he further declared,
as quoted in Newsweek, "We have every reason to believe,
and we intend to prove, when the time comes, that Rackley
was murdered by police agents."

Even without proof, Garry’s version
of the events gained wide currency. The U.P.I.'s listing
of Panthers alleged by a Party spokesman to have been killed
by the police cites "Alex Rackley" simply as " 'tortured
and killed' by the police in New Haven, Conn., in May, 1969."
At Yale, where a national May Day rally was held in the
spring of 1970 to support the Panthers charged in the case,
William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, described the
trial of the accused Panthers as "Panther repression," and
said, "All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law
enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers,
and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these
acts." At the same time, the president of Yale, King man
Brewster, Jr., told striking students who were demanding,
among other things, the release of the Black Panthers awaiting
trial for Rackley's murder, that he was "skeptical of the
ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial
anywhere in the United States," adding, "in large measure,
the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions
against the Panthers in many parts of the country."

At this point, the three Black Panther
officers who were specifically accused of taking Rackley
to the stream near Middlefield, Connecticut, where his body
was found had long since admitted their participation in
the killing. George Sams, Jr., a twenty-three year old Panther
who had once held the rank of field marshal in the National
Black Panther Party, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder,
which In Connecticut carries with it a mandatory sentence
of life imprisonment, and testified that in the early morning
of May 21, 1969, he and Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas,
using a car that McLucas had borrowed, took Rackley, bound
and gagged, from Black Panther headquarters in New Haven
to a deserted spot off Route 147; there Kimbro, under Sams'
direction, shot Rackley in the head with a .45-caliber pistol,
and a few minutes later McLucas fired another shot into
the body. Sams testified that he was acting under orders
from the "national" Party personally given to him by Bobby
Seale. Kimbro pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in
January, 1970, and testified in open court that he fired
the first shot into the back of Rackley's head after Sams
said, "Now." Kimbro, however, refused to implicate Seale
in the crime, testifying that he himself was asleep at the
time Seale was said by Sams to have visited the headquarters.
McLucas, twenty-three, a captain in the Black Panther Party
and a founder of the Bridgeport chapter, gave the same general
account of the killing to New Haven police detectives and
F.B.I. agents two days after he was captured in Salt Lake
City in June, 1969. During his own trial, at which he pleaded
not guilty to the charge of conspiracy, McLucas testified
that he drove Rackley, bound and gagged, along with Sams
and Kimbro, from New Haven to Middlefield; after Kimbro
had shot Rackley, McLucas said, Sams ordered him, McLucas,
"to make sure he was dead." McLucas said he then fired a
second bullet into Rackley. McLucas, like Kimbro, has not
implicated Seale, although he acknowledged under cross-examination
that at the time of the killing he believed be was acting
under orders from "national headquarters." (McLucas was
found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced
to twelve to fifteen years in prison.)